What's It Like Living With Low Vision?

Living with low vision is both kinda awesome and a personal hell simultaneously.

I was doing some research (is anyone surprised?) on what exactly constitutes low vision versus legal blindness in the United States and I've gotten some very interesting results. Come on this journey as I share my enlightenment of this topic through my own eyes  lens.

In the U.S. we have a classification system for levels of vision loss. As most people know 20/20 is perfect vision (and a lovely two part album series by JT!). When the second number gets bigger the more vision loss a person has; for example I'm 20/70 so I can see at 20 feet what a fully sighted person can see at 70 feet away with best correction via glasses/contacts/surgery.

However, you are not 'legally blind' by definition if your visual acuity (or accuracy) is better than 20/200. When I was a little girl I was by definition legally blind but somehow my vision decided to improve slightly so now I can't actually claim legal blindness. In recent years sometimes my mom would say something like, "Helon is legally blind" when explaining my many medical conditions to whomever needed that information but I don't think she knew that wasn't exactly the case in terms of accuracy on a medical standpoint but hey it is an easier explanation, right? Way less wordy for sure.

Let me illustrate to you perfectly sighted people what my vision looks like with a picture I Googled:

See the Snellan chart that says 20/70? Welcome to my visual world, people. Funny thing is in the last few times I've been to my eye doctor when they've always asked if I could read past the fourth line I have actually laughed at the absurdity of that question. 

Some of y'all who know me well might ask, "But didn't your last eye surgery help your vision?" and the answer is no. The only eye surgery that I know of that can truly improve vision loss is LASIK (lol) which I'm a horrible candidate for.

Now that I've explained the  #VisuallyImpairedStruggle there are actually some awesome things about living with low sight including and not limited to: private turs at museums/historical sites if applicable, front row parking spaces (who doesn't love that?) if you drive or passes for people who drive you around because you're too cool to drive yourself so others drive you, front row seats at like any event ever if you can choose your seats, Braille is cool and so is large print, and a white cane or service dog makes you a badass I think or a guy/chick magnet in the case of a dog. 

Appreciate your sight, however low or high your Snellan numbers are people.

The Syndicate Theory- An Introduction

Woo hoo! I'm back for another year of school (and blogs) up in these beautiful North Georgia mountains and I could not be more excited! But I'll post about that a little later because now something else has a bit more of my interest in relation to the blog.

As an introverted scholar I also tend to consider myself as something of a philosopher and as I sit writing I'm listing my favorite philosophers/political theorists/etc in my head. I'm big on Locke's ideas, I've read some Hobbes and Rousseau and Voltaire, and I'm all to familiar with the great American philosophers like Jefferson and Franklin but an unlikely place I found a bit of philosophy recently that I liked was in the latest Mission: Impossible film.

The roots of the theory I've developed, called the Syndicate Theory (named after the organization the IMF tries to bring down in the film), are actually found in the word itself. A syndicate is, by definition in the English language, "a self-organizing group of individuals companies, corporations, or entities formed to pursue or promote a shared interest."

Thus the Syndicate Theory is actually quite simple: everything in my life, and yours, and actually in the universe works like a system to promote a shared interest. Your body? It's a syndicate that has the shared goal of keeping you alive. School? It's a syndicate with the common end goal of preparing students for transition into the real world as functioning members of a society.

Another good example is government. I am taking a Political Science class that is required for my history minor and today we were just talking about my Syndicate Theory but we called it a balance of freedom vs. order. The goal of the syndicate that presents in the form of our government in this country, to me, is to preserve the peace and freedom the United States was founded on.

Now, no syndicate works perfectly. Your body gets sick from time to time and some of those illnesses can threaten the goal of the syndicate, the school system you're in might not be well run and thus you're launched totally unprepared into the real world, governments go rouge and then collapse, etc. By nature no one thing or person can be "perfect" it's just not possible and if that were the case what would be the point of existence? Humans learn to thrive in spite of their imperfections and those imperfections motivate us to better ourselves so we can better the Syndicate that we are all a part of.I don't believe one person can change the world- but certainly a group or a syndicate can.

So that's my rambling and bit of philosophy for the day! Cheers to another year of blogs!